Team scores in
world ThinkQuest competition

For example, participants in ThinkQuest International, a global educational website competition for students aged 9 to 19, are able to utilize their strengths and special skills to create websites with other team members, each assigned to do different tasks.

These websites are published in the ThinkQuest Library, a global online resource with topics ranging from art and entertainment to science and technology. Students and teachers across the globe are encouraged to visit.

Working with passion

Parintorn ("Park") Boonyasirichok is one of the Thai students who participated in this year's international competition, which is organized by the Oracle Education Foundation. He won an Honorable Mention award along with five other team members from the United States and Vietnam. They created their website on epidemiology, the study of diseases.

Instead of filling their website with boring research information on epidemiology, the team cleverly puts the audience in the role of a ``disease detective'' in an interactive game in order to determine the cause of the disease in each case study and to decide whether the symptoms signal an epidemic, says Sudhisak Chanchamnong, senior Business Development manager of Oracle Corporation in Thailand.

Park says he uses his strengths and passion for drawing to the fullest in this competition. He was assigned to draw graphics for the games and for the entire website.

Another team member, Andrew Ang, 16, from the United States, is passionate about the medical field and research. He hopes his career will involve medicine or public health. Ang is responsible for the written content of the website, which required extensive research on epidemiology.

His 14-year-old brother, William Jr, also a teammate, says he works on the website design. He has a great deal of enthusiasm to build anything, including robots and websites.

The website also has a mirror site in Vietnamese. It requires the expertise of Long, their Grade 11 Vietnamese teammate in translating the English content into his native language.

No cultural boundaries

Students are free to choose team members from any country. The competition had winning teams from 17 countries, including Australia, China, India, Singapore, Slovakia, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, the USA and Thailand.

Using email as a medium of communication, team members share their ideas and submit their work to each other and to their primary coach, a teacher in the group who cannot work directly on the website, but may give students guidance.

When Park is assigned by Andrew or William to draw certain cartoon figures, Park admits that the language barrier was an obstacle during their communications.

``Sometimes, what I translate (into my drawing) is not what they want to convey,'' he says. However the group pushed through, despite the language barrier, to finish the website.

What they have been learning

``It (the ThinkQuest competition) teaches you responsibility. Each had a chunk of work to do and if one person doesn't finish their work, everyone else will be at a disadvantage,'' says Andrew, explaining that each member had to complete their work on time.

The project teaches students time management, as they had to manage their time between schoolwork and building the website. William says he designs the website during the early mornings before going to school.

He also says the competition teaches him to cooperate with other people who are prone to have different ideas and to find compromises to keep everyone happy.

Traveling overseas

The top teams will have the chance to travel to San Francisco, California, in November for the ThinkQuest Live event.

Besides receiving the awards, in most cases a laptop computer for each team, students are able to interact with other participants from other countries, including their own team members whom they might be meeting for the first time.

To review this year's winning websites or to find out more information on how to join next year's competition, visit http://thinkquest.org/ .